But We Need To Add Tartness

Sunday, April 23, 2023
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Curated by Jaclyn Quaresma
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Work by Nadia Shihab and Marta Pessoa
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Please join us for a conversation with Nadia Shihab and Jaclyn Quaresma following the program.
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Images Festival, Toronto
Co-presented by Hot Docs

But We Need to Add Tartness is a program that intimately details the lives of women, the love that resonates between them and what drives them together. Together, Sister Mother Lover Child by filmmaker and artist Nadia Shihab and A Name for What I Am by director Marta Pessoa and writer Susana Moreira Marques consider what a person is capable of, self-sufficiency, consent and forced labour as inscribed by a nation.

In her 18 minute, present-day slice-of-life film, Nadia centres the home as a place of assembly where a family of women seem to be both in a state of preparation and maintenance in the aftermath of an unnamed event.

Guided by what has now become a fundamental book of feminism, Women of My Country: 1948-1950 written by Maria Lamas, Marta and Susana ruminate on the role of women in Portuguese society during António de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship and the gendered aftermath of his reign.

Attentively wrapped in resiliency and warmth, these works add to the lexicon of films that continue to expose the insufficiency of gender-lines in a world that increasingly seeks to enforce them.

List of Works

Sister Mother Lover Child
Nadia Shihab
WORLD PREMIERE | CANADA/USA | 2022 | DIGITAL | 18 MIN | IRAQI TURKISH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES
It is spring yet all is coloured by a season of grief. A child dances, the grapevine ripens. We press our ears to the glass and hear singing from afar. Suspended, together, we are an unlikely constellation. I hold the frame until I find the form. Sister mother lover child.

A Name for What I Am
Marta Pessoa and Susana Moreira Marques
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE | PORTUGAL | 2022 | DIGITAL | 116 MIN | PORTUGUESE WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES
Between 1947 and 1949, Maria Lamas travelled through Portugal to document the lives of Portuguese women. As a result, she published The Women of My Country. Now, director Marta Pessoa and writer Susana Moreira Marques attempt to understand the history of this book and how it can speak to us today.